Retaliating Against Col. Khadafy

The U.S. air attack on Libya Monday came as a kind of relief. Everyone assumed something would be done in retribution for Moammar Khadafy`s terror campaign against Americans abroad.

The only question was whether it would be done right.

From the evidence so far, it appears that the air strikes were aimed where they should have been aimed--at the heart of Col. Khadafy`s terrorist command.

The targets were chosen to accomplish something--to hobble the mad colonel`s ability to deploy his bomb carriers around the world. But they were also chosen to make a point, which is that the sovereign sponsors of terror cannot vanish into a crowd the way individual terrorists can. They are subject to the wrath of American retaliation.

This is a useful lesson to deliver and it is only a pity that the United States had to go it virtually alone. The West as a whole has been the victim of Col. Khadafy`s conspiracies, and the nations of the West should have joined in teaching the lesson.

But there were doubts, so many doubts, at home and among the allies. And the arguments of the doubters had become almost tiresomely familiar.

When the U.S. retaliates with its massive military might, the critics asked, and will ask again, doesn`t it look like a bully picking on an inconsequential desert dictator whose country holds not many more people than the City of Chicago?

Won`t we drive other Arab nations, who privately may sympathize with us against Col. Khadafy, into a position of greater public support for him and thereby gratify his delusions about becoming the supreme leader of some fanatical Islamic revolution?

Didn`t our major allies--except to some extent Britain--oppose a U.S. military response? Didn`t we run the risk of killing Libyan civilians--and, for that matter, some of the Americans and other foreigners now in Libya who might be used as hostages by Col. Khadafy?

The answers to all those questions may be yes.

But they do not add up to a convincing argument against the use of military force against Col. Khadafy and his uncivilized behavior.

He is the one playing the bully, and the world has been letting him get away with it. If other Arab nations really privately do agree with us and are only afraid to say so out loud, then they also ought, privately at least, to applaud us for showing him up for what he is.

The principal interests of our European allies, who keep mumbling pusillanimously about diplomatic solutions, appear clearly to be the salvation of their tourism industries and other commercial arrangements with Libya.

If any Libyan civilians were killed in the U.S. air strike, that would be a shame. But they could not possibly be more innocent than the 8-month-old little girl from Annapolis who got blown away in the recent TWA airliner bombing or the old man from New York who got pushed overboard in his wheelchair in the Achille Lauro cruise ship hijacking.

Those Americans still in Libya are now in jeopardy. But they are there because they chose deliberately to ignore an official admonition months ago to get out. (They are also still there, it might be noted, despite the continuing terrorist attacks elsewhere on their own countrymen and Col. Khadafy`s own recent missile attacks on U.S. naval forces exercising their right of free passage in international waters.)

Of course, there will be consequences to the U.S. military move against Col. Khadafy, and some of them may be uncomfortable.

But the consequences of allowing Col. Khadafy and state-sponsored terrorism to run amok indefinitely, to menace and intimidate the entire civilized world, would have been far greater, far more dire, and far, far more frightening.